Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Tuesday Roundup

An assortment of Favorites and maybe a few duds from today's a day's commenting.Favorites, in no particular order:

This sequence, from Bring Back Anthony Mason in the Latino MVP post, is very funny. You sort of have a sense of where it's headed pretty early on, and that's fine. There's plenty of charm and the idea is strong enough that the joke doesn't require any surprise.

Here's a funny, easy little comment from Eddie Murray Sparkles in the Evgeni Malkin post. When I call it easy, I don't mean that it's cheap or lazy or takes the low-hanging fruit; I mean that it possesses that Hume-ish quality of having a very natural delivery, with no obvious tricks or set-up or tortured language. That doesn't necessarily make it funnier, but it does keep the delivery out of the way of the punchline.Here's your runaway Comment of the Day, from The Amazing Sneijderman in the Chiefs Fan Shooting post. Wonderful. That's a perfect one-liner.

Here's a strong one-liner from TVs_Frank in the Chiefs Fan Shooting post. It might be a bit . . . clunky? Staccato? When you put together your comment, sometime before you hit submit, take a look at the various parts of your joke and see if you can't pare them down to their most direct, elegant form. You may not end up going with that version, but it's a good exercise. If you need a rule of thumb, think of words - and more specifically syllables - as barriers and obstacles your reader has to navigate on the way to your punchline. You need a few of those to define the path, but after a certain point, all you're doing is unnecessarily slowing down and cluttering up the process. It's a good idea for a joke and it's in the right order - it's a good joke. I enjoyed it. This is just food for thought.

On its surface, this joke also might seem a little clunky, but Sgt. Hammerclaw is, in fact, making the most specific version of this joke (in the Danika Patrick post) and it requires a word in there that might interrupt the rhythm a bit. That's okay! It's a balancing act, but sometimes you do sacrifice a bit of style in order to take your joke all the way where you want it to go. Good shit.

Here's a downright skeletal dig at Tim Tebow from RMJ=H in the Balloon Bouquet post. Talk about pairing down your delivery! There's literally not one extra syllable in this joke. That is the most straightforward delivery possible. Which is great! The idea is funny, here's the idea. I wish I could tell you when that works and when that fails, but I can't. All I can say is it works here.

And finally, Raysism earned quite the haul of +1s with this one-liner in the A.J. Barker post. I have to admit, initially I had no idea what was going on here. I needed time with this. Anyone else? Or am I a total jackass?

Total Fucking DudsThis is just a flaming car-wreck, from some guy with the handle FuckFuck in the Colin Kaepernick post. There are so many duds, but this one crosses over into being sort of funny. It's so lost. So, so bad. It's worth a chuckle.

So . . . about last night. I was out, there were things, one thing led to another thing. I prefer to focus less on the fact that I didn't get this Roundup done on time and instead celebrate the fact that I LOVE YOU and I'm here now.